ABSTRACT
Abstract Legal Judgement (ALJ) and Concrete Legal Judgement (CLJ), productive of antonymous temporalities, produce different pasts and futures. In the former, one observes pasts which imbue features of space – divisible, uniform, juxtaposed and simultaneous – that lend themselves to chronologising. ALJ claims that the construction of the deracinated liberal legal subject, what is typically understood as the reasonable man, is a temporal construction. CLJ argues that a contingent, constituted and situated legal subject reveals the complexity of this so-called fully agential subject of law. CLJ does not seek to dissolve the doctrine of responsibility but merely to illuminate the presumptions upon which conventional doctrines of responsibility are predicated and to explain how this presumption is one which is a juridico-temporal formation. Socially constructed contexts necessarily precede any given individual and one is unavoidably situated in already existing social practices and conditions that form the grounds and horizons of our world.
